Hatsu ha scritto dom, 20 febbraio 2005 alle 19:07
Ciao a tutti,
vi propongo questo interessantissimo articolo relativo al Game Design Challenge 2004.
Game Design Challenge:
Wright vs. Spector vs. Koster
Three iconic game designers tackle gaming's toughest problem: a Love Story.
It was one part Iron Chef, one part Gong Show. It was the GDC 2004 Game Designer's Challenge, where three famous game gurus were pitted against one another to tackle one of the thorniest of game design problems: creating a love story. Although the audience picked a winner, for the most part it was a cooperative exercise and a bit of a thought experiment.
The three 'contestants' were Will Wright from Maxis (creator of The Sims and SimCity), Warren Spector from Ion Storm (visionary behind Deus Ex and Thief), and Raph Koster the Creative Director of Sony Online Entertainment (who was instrumental in creating Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.) Each had been given the assignment a couple of months ago, and now had ten minutes to present their rough game idea to the crowd. Any constraints about budget and marketability were removed, but interestingly enough the products the designers came up with were fairly marketable and could be created by today's technology. The objective of the panel wasn't so much to see who could come out with the better game, so much as it was to understand (in panel host Eric Zimmerman's words) "how it is that game designers begin to grapple with conceptual problems."
Who won? How'd they do it? Read on to find out!
Warren Spector: The Academic
Spector had a very different approach than the others. He isn't what he called a "blank page" game designer -- he usually synthesizes ideas from others into something new. And when it came to love stories, he had nothing to draw experience from: Games have been dismal at even beginning to tackle the subject of romance.
Instead, he hit the books, doing probably more research than the other two designers combined. His approach to designing a game is very mental: "I pretty much sit alone in a room and think until blood comes out of my forehead," he confessed. Later he sheepishly admitted: "I have trouble thinking of anything that doesn't have guns in it."
But he insisted on not taking the easy way out by making the game multiplayer, instead trying to figure out how to make players "feel something akin to love to a virtual character." He asked himself: How could he make the players experience the stages of love? The physiology of love? The courtship rituals?
What he found were more obstacles than solutions. For one thing, while you can force players to respond to game challenges, you can never make them feel. For another, love is different for every individual -- detecting what would make a player feel that impossible-to-define emotion is itself impossible. And finally the biggest obstacle is that players would know it isn't real.
At length, Spector raised the white flag. The technology of today isn't up to snuff to create what he wanted and it won't be in the near future. "Our characters are bad and our interactions worse," he declared. He concluded that without better characters and better conversation systems, a love story that actually makes a player feel love for a digital character is nearly impossible.
The others took very different approaches.
Raph Koster: The Matchmaker
Despite being the visionary behind two of the most popular multiplayer games of all time, Koster started off by admitting that he felt out of his league. His answer? To cheat! His solution to the problem was less of a game and more of an interactive story with a live audience, but despite his disclaimers it sounded like a fun project.
Koster's game was a "Romance Novel Generator," which he says instead of true love focuses on "a small piece of love that has more to do with money." Romance novels are perfect for computer games. They're formulaic (hell, they even have a main loop), the character arcs are simple, and the characters are archetypes. Having the storylines generated by a computer would be easy.
He envisioned a multiplayer game where people would meet up in a lobby, then decide to start the romance novel together. They'd pick a length and decide how many chapters and how many main characters there would be. They'd all choose roles (the "stalwart friend" or the "rich father") and the computer would assign each person a character flaw (dependant? greedy? social snob?). Everyone would get a character arc and an initial starting point. The ending is pretty much predetermined, but how the characters get there would depend on how they acted out each chapter. For each chapter players would be given a scene, and then some multiple choice for their actions, as well as the ability to chat their own dialogue. Will she pull away and cover her face with a fan? Will she kiss him passionately? Will she say no, but lean in demurely, bosom heaving? It's up to the players!
Nothing is more mass-market than romance novels!
Even better, the game is a spectator sport. Everyone not in the game would be in the chat channels, commenting on the action. ("Kiss her! Kiss her!") "It's a party game rather than an interactive narrative," Koster admits. He even thought about how it would be marketed. No standard game store shelf, here: he'd angle to have it placed on CDs on the back of romance novels, with famous author tie-ins and multiple settings. There would be nearly limitless potential for tie-in products. ("What, endless expansion packs? How crass!" Will Wright joked.) Of course, in the end, boy and girl get together and live happily ever after. "Except one of the endings is that you die from consumption," Koster explained. His game design proved to be a popular one with the audience. Lastly, Sims creator Will Wright stepped up to the plate.
Will Wright: The Experimenter.
"I'm not a fan of the sappy love story," Wright admitted, showing a slide of the movie poster for Titanic with a big thumbs down on it. "But throw in nuclear submarines or extraterrestrials and I'm there..." he continued, showing a slide of the movie Abyss. His favorite romance stories have some sort of huge backdrop: they're war romances, like Casablanca.
Wright went through his thought process, about how he decided to do a multiplayer game, something that would happen in real-time, something that would use profiles of real people to match them up with one another. Making a game where real people would have to get together in a crazy backdrop struck a chord with him. "That's the most surreal to me," he said, always eager to experiment with wild ideas.
To that end he created a war-time romance game that he called a "First-Person Kisser." His FPK would be played entirely within another game -- in this case, his game would take place within a multiplayer game like Battlefield 1942. War is raging! Soldiers are fighting for goals! They've got tanks and airplanes, bombs are falling, jeeps are crashing! In this chaotic background, groups of unarmed civilians try to meet one another in a world gone mad. To the soldiers, they're just collateral damage. Hence the name of his game:
"Collateral Romance."
Wright drew a diagram of a two-axis graph. On the one axis were the soldiers, fighting each other for control of the map. On the other were the civilians, with their own agenda. He said he'd leave the middle "undefined," allowing the players themselves to figure out what would happen if the soldiers and the civilians crossed paths. Would the soldiers help them? Shoot them on sight? Ask them to spy? Wright left that up in the air as a psychological experiment.
Here's how it would work: a man and a woman, chosen by the computer for having similar interests and romantic possibilities, would start on opposite ends of a raging battlefield. They'd have to arrange for a place to meet and they'd try to get there without being killed, scurrying between shelled-out buildings and staying away from the tanks and bombs. When they made it? A big reunion scene! Then, the newly united couple would be given another goal to reach together, somewhere else on the map. Would they go straight there? Would they just hide in a building and chat to each other? Would they get together with other civilians? Would they ask the soldiers for help? Would the man nobly sacrifice himself so that the woman could make it? It's all up in the air! "I want to leave the goal structure of the game open-ended," Wright said.
Wright's presentation had the audience in hysterics, owing in part to his simple little clip-art lovers running around on top of screenshots of Battlefield 1942. After all three designers had spoken, audience applause granted first prize (a dozen fake roses) to Will Wright. I doubt we'll see Collateral Romance on store shelves soon, but it was almost as fun as a thought experiment as it would be as a game. More importantly, it was cool to see all three designers tackle the same problem from radically different angles.